1.A Exigence: What Provoked the Text (RHS-1.B)

Every piece of writing that feels urgent got written because something happened. That something is the exigence: a real condition in the world, usually recent, that the writer cannot let sit. It explains why this text exists now rather than last year or never. Find it by asking what changed right before the writer picked up the pen. If you can point to a date, a letter received, a report delivered, a law passed, you have probably found it. If all you can point to is a general fact about the world, you have found the subject instead, and subjects do not expire.

Exigence is easy to confuse with purpose, but they sit on opposite sides of the text. Exigence is what came in from outside and started the writing; purpose is what the writer wants to go out and change. A pharmacist does not write because she wants the state board to act, she writes because the wholesaler cut insulin allocation on Tuesday, and that cut is what she wants the board to undo. The cut dates the letter. The fix is the goal. Mixing these up makes students describe every exigence as a wish rather than an event.

Exigence also connects straight to audience and message, the other pieces of the rhetorical situation. Once you know what provoked the text, you can ask who has the power to respond to that provocation, and that narrows the audience. The message then becomes the writer's attempt to move that audience from the provoking event toward the stated purpose. Reading for exigence first keeps the other five components from floating free of the text.